So these past 2 weeks I’ve been adding some “bits and bytes” to the engine. Taking a rest between some more complex game mechanisms I decided to start doing a video player. After a bit research I decided to choose theora, but a bit skeptic, I’ve used it before on a game company I worked [...]

Render to texture is a very handy functionality. Imagine your game allows for some character customization. You have the body, some different hats, different clothes and other small stuff. Now the easiest way to render this is to just draw it piece by piece every frame. With the proper Z coordinates everything falls in place. [...]

So you can’t make a game without images, right? Well, actually you can but that’s another story. But how can you load a jpg or a png and use then on OpenGLES? First let’s make a simple class Texture2D class Texture2D { public: Texture2D(int texture id, int width, int height) { _textureId = id; _width [...]

This had me scratching my head for awhile. At first I thought that glGetRenderbufferParameterivOES would properly detect Retina screen at 960×640 but it keeps returning 480×320. A little explanation on Retina screen first. Older devices have 320×480 screen resolution. With new iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G the screen has 640×960 but on the same [...]

Even tough it’s not mandatory to support all screen orientations it’s always nice to support at least 2 of them. Let’s imagine your game is landscaped, by some reason the user may want to use either with the home button on the left or on the right. Most games support this, if you flip the [...]

It’s been awhile since I last updated this, I’ve have my hands full with Vizati IPhone. Ever since I got an IPod Touch 2G it was easier for Rita to get a sense of the screen size (although we knew to be 320×480) it’s different when you are testing on the real thing, text looks [...]